Using Coveo with Sitecore. Part 2: Performing a Query

This post is a part of the "Using Coveo with Sitecore" series.

• Indexing Sitecore items
• Performing a Query (this post)
• Tips and Tricks (snippets, hidden features and real-world examples)

There are many ways to retrieve data from Coveo, I'll describe most popular of them, their proc and cons.

Integrating search interface "as is"
Such integration of Coveo can be implemented in a day or even less, including configuring Sitecore Connector which will crawl only changed / newly created items, adding and configuring front-end search.

In order to add search interface to your website you need to:

Using Coveo with Sitecore. Part 1: Indexing Sitecore items

Coveo Search Platform provides a Sitecore package with a module called "Sitecore Connector", which allows you to crawl not just pages, but also content items without presentation, media library, etc. While Connector configuration is described rather well in this document, there are lot of major points that are not enough clear to the programmer who starts using it.

There are lot of things to do with Coveo, so I'll break the whole story into the different blog posts:

• Indexing Sitecore items - this post
• Performing a query (Coveo controls and custom Query Wrappers)
• Tips and Tricks (snippets, hidden features and real-world examples)

Let's begin from creating a Sitecore template that will contain different field types:

Tag Cloud from Sitecore content

Let's assume you have a Sitecore site containing "Products" section, it is well-structured by categories, and contains many thousands of items.



Some day you decide to add tags to all your products...

No problem, you should just find a place to store tags



And then add a new field to the product template



Here what you got on each product:


Now the most interesting part, we need to build a tag cloud based on these values. There are lot of ways to implement it, but when you have to deal with really big content tree, the most suitable solution is using some search engine. In this example I'll use Coveo, but it's possible to implement the same functionality using Lucene with almost the same effort.